rankings · safety
Safest Cities in America (2026 Rankings)
US cities with the lowest violent and property crime rates in 2026, and why those numbers tell only part of the story.
Safety is the non-negotiable for most people deciding where to live. It's also a dimension people badly over- and under-estimate. Perceptions of safety track with news coverage, not data — so a ranking based on FBI Crime Data Explorer numbers is a useful reset.
What we rank on
FBI Crime Data Explorer publishes violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault) and property crime (burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft) rates per 100,000 residents. We combine both and rank cities by the total — lower is better. Our safety score is the percentile rank inverted, so a score of 95 means the city is in the safest 5% of US cities.
Top safest US cities
Irvine, CA
Consistently one of the safest large cities in America. Planned community, high median income, no dense urban core. Property crime rates half the national average; violent crime less than a quarter.
Naperville, IL
Another perennially top-rated safe city. Chicago suburb, affluent, tight community. Low on almost every crime category.
Gilbert, AZ
Phoenix suburb with a reputation for low crime and highly-rated schools. Growing fast as families flee more expensive coastal metros.
Cary, NC
Research Triangle suburb. High education, high income, low crime — the standard pattern for our safest-cities list.
Frisco, TX
DFW suburb, corporate HQs, master-planned, low crime. Same profile as Cary and Plano on the safety dimension.
The pattern
Top of the list is dominated by well-planned affluent suburbs near major metros. This is unsurprising: crime rates correlate strongly with poverty rates and dense urban cores with economic stress. Suburbs of Austin, DFW, Phoenix, Raleigh, and Chicago dominate the top 20.
Small Midwestern and New England cities also show up — places like Portland, Maine or Burlington, Vermont — where population density is low and economic stress is limited.
What these rankings don't capture
Neighborhood variation. City-wide averages hide enormous variation within a city. New York City has a low violent- crime rate for a major metro, but specific blocks are much more dangerous. Always look at neighborhood-level data for your actual commute and home location.
Reporting differences. FBI data relies on local departments reporting consistently. Some cities under-report, some over-report. The signal is real but noisy at the margins.
Non-crime safety.Traffic fatalities, pedestrian deaths, and natural disaster risk aren't in our safety score but matter to actual safety. A walkable city with high crime may still be safer than a car-dependent city with low crime.
Trend direction.A city with a 5% higher crime rate that's been declining 10% a year may be safer in two years than a city with a lower rate that's trending up. Our ranking is a snapshot.
How safety interacts with other dimensions
The cities at the top of our safest-cities ranking are not cheap. Irvine, Naperville, Cary — all well above the national average on cost of living. That's the tradeoff: the same socioeconomic conditions that suppress crime also raise housing prices. If affordability is also a priority, expect to compromise on one dimension or the other, unless you find a hidden-gem city where both align.
Our family ranking is a useful shortcut — it weights safety at 25% and affordability at 25%, so it naturally surfaces cities that are both.
Full ranking and per-city detail
See the full UrbRank safety ranking by visiting any city's UrbRank Score page — the safety dimension is broken out explicitly, and you can compare cities head-to-head on just that metric.
Data sources
FBI Crime Data Explorer — violent and property crime reports by agency. We use the most recent annual totals, normalized per 100,000 residents from Census population estimates. Cities with incomplete or missing reports in a given year are excluded from the ranking for that year.